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3 New Year’s resolutions for your business

Want to give your business a lift, have more time to focus on your core work and boost sales? As a digital marketing and web design company, at boxChilli we’ve seen the enormous impact a few simple tweaks in the digital world can make to your real-life bank account. Here are our top resolutions for small and medium sized businesses – whether you’re offering financial services in Portsmouth or supporting the riggers in Aberdeen, if you have a web presence we can help.

1. I will make more use of web data

Online stores and websites make it easy to capture data about your customers. The software running your site will automatically register information you could never ask a walk-in client. Unfortunately, it may well be throwing most of it away. If you’re not already tracking your site statistics, start now, and once you’re comfortable dive deeper into the data. By learning about your customers you can make the products and services – and the special offers – more tempting, boosting your sales. As an example, if you know when your customers shop (right after payday perhaps?) you’ll know when to launch new products. If you know which products or services are typically bought together, you can tailor special offers to meet those needs. You can also find out how often they return, which websites refer them to you and all the other nitty-gritty of web traffic data. To do this, you may need to update the software managing your website,tweak the web design, or install additional tools – get in touch if you have questions.

2. I will hire an expert

Yes, you can do it all yourself, but is it really the best use of your time? As the digital world gets more complex, hiring a specialist freelancer can be incredibly cost effective, freeing up hours of your time to let you focus on your core business. Which experts are worth their weight in gold and which are a dead loss will depend on your skills and experience. As an example, a webshop might benefit from hiring a professional photographer for a day to do a series of well-lit and attractive product shots, while a wedding photographer might benefit from hiring a web designer to spruce up their pages. From managing your Twitter account to creating a video advertisement, there are dozens of cost-effective ways to gain expert support for your business without hiring a new employee.

3. I will build a sustainable social network

With so many things, from kid’s toys to news articles ‘going viral’, overnight success is often seen as the only way to build a social network. In practise, however, a sudden influx of visitors can quickly overwhelm a small business and do more damage than benefit. Instead, work on building a sustainable social network – tweak your web design to make it easy for customers to share your products. Use account managing software to schedule posts and update multiple accounts at once. Reply to genuine customers and reward your followers. By taking it slowly but applying a steady effort, you can build a community online that actually matters – after all, if you’re a hairdresser in Portsmouth or a plumbing supply shop in Hull will a thousand followers in Utah really help your business?